Dreamland (Vintage) Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

Dreamland (Vintage) Book

Would a new, liberal, and ecumenical Europe emerge from the bloody horrors of World War I and the dismantling of long-entrenched autocracies? The answer, according to Howard Sachar's authoritative Dreamland, is a resounding "No." Sachar describes what we now know was the rapid collapse of post-war idealism by tracing the social and political fortunes of the continent's most fragile, resilient, and high-profile minority: the Jews. Though the bedrock of the book is a wide-ranging analysis of the highly complex European stew of nationalism, xenophobia, re-invention and revolutionary movements, Sachar manages to turn it into a narrative of sorts by focusing on the lives of a half-dozen or so "canaries in the mine": Sigmund Freud; Marcel Proust, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Kafka, and Hungary's Bela Kun among them. Dreamland is a formidable work of erudition and scholarship; illuminating but extremely detailed and demanding. --H. O'BillovitchRead More

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  • Product Description

    By the end of World War I, in November 1918, Europe’s old authoritarian empires had fallen, and new and seemingly democratic governments were rising from the debris. As successor states found their place on the map, many hoped that a more liberal Europe would emerge. But this post-war idealism all too quickly collapsed under the political and economic pressures of the 1920s and '30s. Howard M. Sachar chronicles this visionary and tempestuous era by examining the fortunes of Europe’s Jewish minority, a group whose precarious status made them particularly sensitive to changes in the social order. Writing with characteristic lucidity and verve, Sachar spotlights an array of charismatic leaders–from Hungarian Communist Bela Kun to Germany’s Rosa Luxemburg, France’s Socialist Prime Minister Léon Blum and Austria’s Sigmund Freud–whose collective experience foretold significant democratic failures long before the Nazi rise to power. In the richness of its human tapestry and the acuity of its social insights, Dreamland masterfully expands our understanding of a watershed era in modern history.

  • 0375708294
  • 9780375708299
  • Howard M. Sachar
  • 31 October 2002
  • Vintage Books
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 385
  • Reprint
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